Dream house, dream life, yeah right. Dream on…

Posts tagged ‘salon’

A couple of years ago I bought a new in desk extractor fan for dust and fumes for the nail salon. It cost a small fortune, and for another small fortune I could have got it already seated in a cheap and nasty laminate desk that didn’t really fit the space I had at the time. (Most of them had one small drawer for storage, if that.)

I started out thinking I’d have to make a desk, then ran across an oval computer desk in a discount clearance centre. I’d seen this desk at $90, looked at it at $69 and decided it was too flimsy (the oval sat atop the two side pieces (a file drawer and a computer tower box) on 2 tubes that allowed the drawers to roll under the desk.)

When it hit $25 I looked at it again with new eyes. For $25 I got 2 pairs of drawer slides, 8 castors, and a nice large top – all in horrid brown plastic laminate (crapboard as my neighbour calls it). The top was big enough to fit the fan in, which was the most important consideration. So I bought 2 of them.

I shaped one top, attached it to the bases with 2 posts each side (so much more stable), mounted the fan, set up one set of drawers, cut the other set down and made them sliding shelves, added some wings to hold UV lamps and even cut the spare top in half and made shelves.

I ended up with raw chipboard against me as I worked and so it got covered with a layer of duct tape. One day soon I would give it a coat of paint I said.

Three years later, the salon has moved rooms, the duct tape was half off for the third time and the acetone had wiped away some of the plastic wood finish. It looked charming – not.

So, since I had the paints out for the kitchen, and I had a sudden surge of clients that left me with a week without any appointments, I taped off the metal, undid the wings, rolled on some primer and a coat of Lexicon white acrylic.

Then I started playing. I diluted some black acrylic, brushed it on, sponged it back, rolled over it with diluted white, brushed some more, rolled some more.

And TaDa!

I went into Bunnings to see if there was a non yellowing oil based polyurethane to seal it with (can’t use acrylics with acetone around). I didn’t think there was, thought I would probably be rolling on a coat or two of normal poly and watching it yellow up over the next year or two. But the woman serving me said there was a clear paint, not a poly, from Dulux. It was low chemical and so didn’t yellow she said. The label said it discouraged chroming with low chemicals. It wasn’t until afterwards that I discovered chroming is the word for using spray paint fumes to get high!

So I sprayed my desktop.

This was it two days later after 3 light coats.

No that is not the lighting, it is yellow! Not cream, or slightly off white. Yellow!

Lesson learned – This is NOT CLEAR.

My desk looked like something pulled out of grandma’s kitchen which hadn’t been changed since 1930.

I couldn’t face the thought of all those layers and dying times again. But I couldn’t live with pee yellow either, even the fake woodgrain had been better.

So I got the primer out again, and coated the desk. Then a coat of white semi gloss enamel (left over from door frames). Then the next day, another coat of white, this time with some diluted black enamel (left over from my bedroom trim) painted into the white while it was still wet, with a feather. No sponging, no blotting. A couple of spots got a bit of another layer over them to fix up strange bits the next day. No sealer (so it’s not as shiny as it was). And there are brush marks because I didn’t use the roller this time.

But it looks so fresh and bright. And best of all, it doesn’t show the acrylic dust, which was the whole reason for painting it 😉

There are black buttons that cover the screw holes, it just isn’t dry enough yet 🙂

My first memory of living in this house was the night we moved in, walking in on a cold wet winter’s night after a long car trip from our old house and Dad (who had come earlier with the furniture) was sitting in an easy chair in front of a roaring fire. We’d never had an open fire before and I loved it.

Unfortunately, the chimney design sucked (or more to the point, didn’t suck) and so regularly smoked us out if the wind changed), so over the years we gradually stopped using the fireplace.

A few months ago, trying to work out how to keep the house I decided I had to let out some bedrooms. Since I was using them all this meant some major reorganisation.

My first thought was to stay put in my little bedroom and tiny study and move the salon into the spare room and let out the lounge and master bedroom.

Then I decided I could get more money letting 3 small rooms than 1 or 2 larger rooms. So, the contents of my tightly organised and packed study would need to move into the large, open, loungeroom, a room with no morning sun, a hearth and a fireplace and essentially no walls. This meant finding room for walls of books and folders, boxes of beads and assorted craft stuff, a desk and shelves full of scrapbooking supplies, a table (that my father built) from the sunroom, and the myriad of office supplies that any self respecting stationery junkie always has on hand.

Later, I decided that the salon really didn’t earn itself a bedroom of its own and had to move into the lounge too.

So, if youy’re looking for something, it’s probably in the um lounge, I mean the new study um, ah, that is the salon, or the um craft room.Actually, right at the moment I probably have no idea where it is!

The um, study, from the library/hall

The wall colours are Dulux Azure Blue, and White Duck half.

The book nook. Can't wait to get the fireplace working again this winter.

The craft corner. Not sure what I have planned to deal with this mess.

Having just managed to buy the house I've lived in since I was nine I'm now in a race against time to refashion it to house myself in the sort of comfort I think I deserve and three students to pay the huge mortgage that I wouldn't have if I hadn't been so emotionally attached to this house and the garden.
The house number is 28, a lucky number in my family, the house where I was born was also no. 28. The street is an Aboriginal word for eucalyptus (gum trees). There are no gum trees on the property.

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